Chávez, Cancer, and Cuba

These are traumatic times for Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez, who recently revealed that he was suffering from an unspecified form of cancer. Last week, Chávez asked his National Assembly for permission to return to Cuba, where he spent most of June, for chemotherapy treatment. It was there that his illness was first diagnosed and he underwent an operation that removed a tumor “the size of a baseball,” as Chávez described it, from his pelvic area. Chávez was upbeat, saying he was “loving life” as never before. Yesterday, a smiling Raúl Castro was shown on television greeting Chávez warmly at Havana’s airport.

Chávez’s decision to go to Cuba for his medical treatment—and to continue ruling Venezuela from there, in characteristic defiance of his domestic political critics—caps a long public love affair between the extroverted Venezuelan, who assumed power in 1999, and his proclaimed political mentor, Fidel Castro. So great is Chávez’s admiration for Fidel, and for his go-it-alone example in a hemisphere traditionally dominated by the United States, that Chávez has ruminated aloud about an eventual merger of the two allied states into one called “Venecuba.”

Chávez has also made a barter arrangement in which Cuba, a country generally strapped for energy, receives Venezuela’s oil in exchange for the expertise of tens of thousands of Cuban doctors, teachers, and athletic instructors. In a neat irony that is not lost on Chávez, the U.S. continues to buy the bulk of Venezuela’s oil, essentially subsidizing his largesse to the longtime American foes in Havana.

But Chávez’s attachment to Fidel and to his brother Raúl (who now runs the island as President following Fidel’s retirement, in 2008) is something emotional, too, deeper than mere politics. Some of the Chávez children have spent extended periods in Cuba living and studying, and his older brother, Adan, was for years his personal ambassador there. Chávez himself has travelled to Cuba scores, if not hundreds, of times during his thirteen years as Venezuela’s President, treating Cuba, in effect, as an offshore territory in a joint revolutionary enterprise in which, despite his bigger pocketbook, he has always seen himself as the junior partner.

In 2008, while reporting on Chávez for The New Yorker, I accompanied him on a twenty-four-hour visit to the Dominican Republic. We were boarding the presidential plane for the return flight to Caracas when Chávez suddenly turned to his entourage and yelled excitedly: “Let’s go to Havana.” His aides sighed and rolled their eyes—it was a typically impulsive move by Chávez—but they were not unhappy.

We did go to Havana, and Raúl Castro awaited us on the airport tarmac. (He had become President two weeks earlier, because of Fidel’s own prolonged illness, diverticulitis, which nearly killed him.) After the greetings, Chávez vanished with Raúl and the rest of us did not see him until we were back on the jet the next day. He had been to visit the ailing Fidel, he informed us, beaming: “He’s fine and send his best to all of you!”

In a way, there is already an informal “Venecuba”: the Boliviarian Alliance for the Americas, or ALBA, economic bloc of states (Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua & Barbuda, St. Vincent and the Grenadines) that Chávez has helped sponser and subsidize. In his vaunted Bolivarian revolution, Chávez seeks to shift the region away from dependency on the United States by redefining Venezuela’s—and ultimately Latin America’s—political economy through fraternal ties and new, “socialist” forms of barter trade and other exchanges with like-minded governments. Though not all of them are as closely allied as the ALBA countries, there are now left-of-center governments in power in a majority of Latin American states, including Brazil (which poses a hugely successful, competitive countermodel to Chávez’s). That this trend has come about at all is due in large measure to Chávez’s influence and oil-boom-fuelled economic subsidies—and to his Cuban ties, too—at a time of markedly waning U.S. power in the region.

If it transpires that Chávez has to spend another six months shuttling between Havana and Caracas for his treatment (as his Vice-President Elias Juau suggested recently) having also continued to administer Venezuela’s affairs from there, it will be yet another remarkable threshold he’s crossed. Chávez is already Latin America’s ultimate comeback kid, a former army paratrooper who won Venezuela’s presidency in 1998 in a landslide after being amnestied and released from prison for a failed armed rebellion. That revolt of Chávez’s, in 1992, took place nearly forty years after Fidel Castro began his own revolution in Cuba with an armed raid against the eastern Moncada army barracks. It was an attack in which most of Fidel’s followers were gunned down, and for which he was imprisoned, only to be released two years later in an ill-advised amnesty granted by his country’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista. When Fidel left prison, in 1955, he made his way to Mexico to organize another rebel army. That one, of course, was ultimately successful.

Upon his own release from prison, in 1994, the first thing Chávez did was to fly to Cuba. He was hoping to meet his hero Fidel so as to seek his guidance about his political future. To Chávez’s great surprise, when he landed in Havana, Fidel was waiting for him at the airport.